Gaming as a Perfectionist

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All of us can remember those heartbreaking moments when you go to a path you think is optional but you quickly realise that it is an actual main path and you just skipped some side stuff :face-purple-crying:

Crossroads of not being sure which way is the "right way" then taking a few steps to gather more info and being locked into a cutscene that pushes me to an entirely new area with no way back is the source of my trust issues.

I think the worst part of this tendency is that it's the games you LOVE most that you want to see every bit of, so they're the ones you end up ruining for yourself with perfectionism. There's nothing like seeing an 'achievable' route to 100% for making me get bored and drop off instead. I do have OCD and I am trying to work on this. There are some games that I won't even play because I know they're going to trigger the inner 'checklist'. Honestly, any game that makes it easy to go back and finish loose ends is doing it right.

Yeah but also the high you get when you DO find a hidden cutscene, funny dialogue, or secret weapon is something else

Finally someone talks about this. I feel absolutely insane when I play games just because of this thing.

JRPGs did this to me. Getting to the end and being like "I was supposed to do WHAT 26 hours ago?" is a very compulsion-forming feeling.

Tim Rogers mentions this in his first Action Button video on FF7R. “Trinketitis” he calls it, which refers both to developers’ sense of obligation to pack games with unnecessary baubles in random corners off the main path (“tchotchke pockets”), and gamers’ sick compulsion to check these corners despite tremendous dissonance with story objectives and even when they KNOW it will not be worthwhile. The overall effect on the gameplay experience is something we all recognize but rarely interrogate. Seeing someone else independently realize this and articulate it in their own thorough way is fascinating.

This is why I accept that I'm gonna do multiple playthroughs. I actually love doing a "me" run where I play the way I wanna play, explore how I wanna explore, and fuck around, experiment and fully engage with the story. Then I have a "janitor" playthrough where I do cleanup and see what I missed and get to engage with the conversation about everything online. Resident Evil did this to me and I love it for it

“Play the game like you’ll play it again” is a phrase I saw on someone’s fire emblem YouTube video comment section that REALLY helped me with this issue. Whether I actually do play it again or not does not matter- I just like the freedom it gives me to make mistakes and move on.

That first clip of FF7R is so funny cause it’s literally just me in every game. The camera points you in the right direction, the characters are walking that direction so you start creeping that way as you turn your camera but the opposite direction is an open hallway that definitely leads to nothing and is just a waste of time but you see it’s there and immediately are sprinting that direction.

I've been calling this phenomenon Dalliance: the strong need to avoid the "right way" until you've explored the "wrong way" first. This is most deadly in games with environmental puzzles like (Uncharted or SOMA) where you'll go the wrong way, mutter "what does this do" while you pull a lever or something, and it unblocks the right path forward that you never saw or even knew was blocked because you were too busy going the wrong way first!

I feel like perfectionism gets in the way of both my ability to enjoy games and my ability to do day-to-day tasks. I get burned out from my unrealistic standards for my tasks and play a game to avoid feeling that way again, only to get burned out from playing a game because I have unrealistic goals in the game. And then I just end up feeling like doing absolutely nothing. So yeah, probably better to just take it easy and be okay with letting things be imperfect, be it video games or general life stuff.

I learned this 10 years ago, when i got my first son. No time to search every corner and do every sidequest og getting platinum trophies. Focus on main quest, and do side stuff that is engaging. As a bonus i found out that progressing main story often unlocks stuff making side stuff easier 😉👍

This is definitly me. I always talk to each NPC in a RPG after each mission to see if anyone changed their dialog. I try to get every interaction with every item and background element. I use more brain power to determine which way is the main objective and which is the bonus path than to study for my CS exams.

The way that I fixed this was to refocus my perfectionism on a different aspect of the game. Instead of optimizing for completion, I optimized for immersion. The first step was to disallow the use of maps, scans, waypoints, radars, and other artificial navigation aids. Fucking unbind the button if you have to. Now some games are just unplayable like this, but we're looking for level design involving things like intelligently placed paths, radiant communication of nearby content, verbal navigation instructions, breadcrumb signage, and visually distinctive landmarks. In order to find what to do next, the game has to hit you with one or more of these things. You may even want to take notes so you remember the verbal instructions for later. It's not up to you what you're doing next because you have to actually search and learn the level layout, like you do in real life when you move to a new town. You will get lost doing this, but when that monkey starts screaming at me to check the other way, now I yell back "No, my character would never do that," because I used my perfectionism to cure my perfectionism

Finally! You made a video specifically about me. I triple normal playtimes because I literally clear the map. I avoid the main quest until there’s nothing left. I absolutely must have every item, piece of gear, and kill every enemy. I often organically fully complete games because of how I play. I would feel like I was missing out on the most important gameplay if I only did the main quest.

My fear of missing content is so strong that I have no compunctions about using walkthroughs or looking up what's missable beforehand, and I'm perfectly content that way.

Never has there been an essay that spoke so specifically to both my video games and my adhd

i never really saw this type of behavior as perfectionism, i believe i do it because i like to explore everything the developers add to their games. they spent their time creating these side contents, so it would be a shame if i didn't see everything there is to see